Speak the Language Fluently

As programmers, we are translators in a way: we take a description of a program expressed in human languages and translate it to a real program expressed in a programming language. Translators must be fluent in both languages to be effective.

However, fluency in programming languages is somewhat ill-defined. Many books and courses say they will teach us, for example, Java in 21 days. I’ve even seen one book that claims to teach Java in just 24 hours. Perhaps we could learn the syntax of Java and some of its library calls, but could we call ourselves fluent after 24 hours, or even 21 days? No way.